The Woman Who Would Be King (45 page)

10.
Amen is also known as Amen-Re in his manifestation as King of the Gods.
Amen
literally means “hidden.” To unite that which is hidden and thus permeates everything with that which is visible—the sun god Re—creates a powerful new divine manifestation as Amen-Re. Amen’s other manifestations include Amen-Min, the sexually excited form of the god who can engender his own rebirth; Amen Kamutef, or “Amen Bull of His Mother,” who can impregnate his own mother with the essence of his own future self; and Amen-djeser-a, meaning “Amen Sacred of Arm,” a clear allusion to his ability to create himself from nothing. For more on the god Amen, see Kurt Heinrich Sethe,
Amun und die acht Urgötter von Hermopolis, eine Untersuchung über Ursprung und Wesen des aegyptischen Götterkönigs
(Berlin: Verlag der Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1929), and Jan Assmann,
Egyptian Solar Religion in the New Kingdom: Re, Amun and the Crisis of Polytheism
, Studies in Egyptology (London: Kegan Paul International, 1995).

11.
For more on Karnak, see Elizabeth Blyth,
Karnak: Evolution of a Temple
(London: Routledge, 2006), and Diane Favro, Willeke Wendrich, and Elaine Sullivan, “Digital Karnak,” University of California, Los Angeles,
http://​dlib.​etc.​ucla.​edu/​projects/​Karnak/
.

12.
For more on the God’s Wife of Amen, see Erhart Graefe,
Untersuchungen zur Verwaltung und Geschichte der Institution der Gottesgemahlin des Amun vom Beginn des neuen Reiches bis zur Spätzeit
(Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1981), and Robins,
Women in Ancient Egypt
, 149–56. For more on the political and economic powers of the God’s Wife office, see Betsy Bryan, “Property and the God’s Wives of Amun,” in
Women and Property
, a conference with The Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard. Deborah Lyons and Raymond Westbrook, eds. Published online at
www.​chs.​harvard.​edu/
.

13.
For the statues of Min, see Barry Kemp,
Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization
(London: Routledge, 1991), 79–85, fig. 28.

14.
This analysis isn’t completely accepted by scholars who see little evidence of Merytamen serving as God’s Wife, but see Lana Troy,
Patterns of Queenship
, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensus Boreas 14 (Uppsala: University of Uppsala, 1986), 162–63. For a brief history of the God’s Wives of Amen in the early Eighteenth Dynasty, see Bryan, “Eighteenth Dynasty Before the Amarna Period,” 226–30, and Robins,
Women in Ancient Egypt
, 149–56.

15.
It has been suggested that Thutmose I’s mother was married to Ahmose-Sipairi, making him the grandson of Seventeenth Dynasty king Seqenenre Taa. See Aidan Dodson and Dyan Hilton,
The Complete Royal Families of Ancient Egypt
(London: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 126. The mummy from the royal cache at Theban Tomb 320 that is usually identified as Thutmose I is most certainly not him. See Salima Ikram and Aidan Dodson,
The Mummy in Ancient Egypt: Equipping the Dead for Eternity
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1998), 320–30.

16.
The Amduat was the first of the Underworld Books, a series of magical incantations and descriptions of the underworld space inside of the sky, through which the dead sun god was believed to travel after his setting in the west. The Amduat came to be used only for kings’ burials, but curiously the vizier Useramen, a contemporary of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III, had the text inscribed in his private tomb. Some Egyptologists believe the Amduat was composed from scratch during the Eighteenth Dynasty, while others believe that these texts were parts of older temple liturgies that tied the king’s afterlife journey to the successful passage of the sun through the hours of night. See Erik Hornung,
The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife
, trans. David Lorton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 27–53.

17.
There is a debate over whether KV 38 was Thutmose I’s original tomb, or whether it had been made for him by his grandson Thutmose III after his mummy’s removal from Hatshepsut’s burial chamber in KV 20. It is also possible that even if the tomb was made during his lifetime, the decoration was added at the time of the move from KV 20 and that the latter was decorated with the Amduat by Hatshepsut. For more on the debate about these royal tombs, see Catharine H. Roehrig, “The Building Activities of Thutmose III in the Valley of the Kings,” in
Thutmose III: A New Biography
, ed. Eric H. Cline and David O’Connor (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 238–59.

18.
For more on the Egyptian harem, see Silke Roth, “Harem,”
UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology
, 2012,
http://​escholarship.​org/​uc/​item/​1k3663r3​?query=​harem
.

19.
For a discussion of ancient Egyptian palaces, see in particular Manfred Bietak, ed.,
House and Palace in Ancient Egypt
, Denkschriften der Gesamtakademie 14 (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 1996).

20.
I have chosen to use the name Ahmes instead of Ahmose for Hatshepsut’s mother, to avoid confusion with King Ahmose. Both names mean “The moon is born” and are spelled with the same hieroglyphs, except for the determinative (the explanatory sign at the end of a word); however, the pronunciation for each sex would have likely been different. Most think Thutmose I did not marry Ahmes until his accession; see Bryan, “Eighteenth Dynasty Before the Amarna Period,” 231. Some Egyptologists argue that Ahmes may have married Thutmose I before his accession to the throne, which would mean Hatshepsut was many years older when she married Thutmose II. See Ann Macy Roth, “Models of Authority: Hatshepsut’s Predecessors in Power,” in
Hatshepsut: From Queen to Pharaoh
, ed. Catharine H. Roehrig (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 11, and Peter F. Dorman, “The Early Reign of Thutmose III: An Unorthodox Mantle of Coregency,” in Cline and O’Connor,
Thutmose III: A New Biography
, 60. This is unlikely, however, given the many ostensible barriers for the King’s Sisters and Daughters to marry anyone other than the king. It is also unlikely that a nonroyal man would have been allowed to marry a King’s Sister before his accession to the throne, and there is no evidence of such a thing taking place in the early Eighteenth Dynasty.

21.
This is not to say that I argue for any kind of “heiress theory” that the new and unrelated king was required to marry a specific female member of the old family to secure his place. I do suggest, however, that a new king with no relation to the old dynastic line would have been expected to take on one or more of that older family’s women as wives, to ensure that his offspring also be related to that original family. For more on the importance of royal women in the Eighteenth Dynasty, see Bryan, “Eighteenth Dynasty Before the Amarna Period,” 226–30. Also see Gay Robins, “A Critical Examination of the Theory That the Right to the Throne of Ancient Egypt Passed Through the Female Line in the 18th Dynasty,”
Göttinger Miszellen
62 (1983): 68–69.

22.
The historical information about Ahmes is unclear. She has the title of King’s Sister but not King’s Daughter. See Troy,
Patterns of Queenship
, 163. In
L’Égypte et la vallée du Nil
, vol. 2,
De la fin de l’ancient empire à la fin du nouvel empire
(Paris: PUF, 1995), Claude Vandersleyen argues that she was Thutmose I’s own sister. But according to Betsy Bryan (“Eighteenth Dynasty Before the Amarna Period,” 231), Ahmes’s name suggests that she was a member of Amenhotep I’s family, perhaps a daughter of Prince Ahmose-ankh, a son of Ahmose and Ahmes-Nefertari and a brother of Amenhotep I.

Even though we do see Ahmes’s title of King’s Sister only after the marriage,
there is no evidence of a woman named Ahmes at all before the reign of Thutmose I. Before her marriage to the king, she was essentially invisible, as so many royal women were when they had no political or ideological use. Based on the fact that Ahmes was named King’s Sister but not King’s Daughter, we might conclude that she was sister to Amenhotep I or another early Eighteenth Dynasty king and that Amenhotep I could not produce male or female heirs. If Ahmes was the sister of Amenhotep’s father, Ahmose, the previous king, then she must have been one of his much younger sisters, given that Ahmose’s son, Amenhotep I, ruled for twenty years.

In any event, the lack of an heir made Ahmes very important. This royal woman’s connections to the Ahmoside family may have been essential for Thutmose to create a convincing claim to the throne, because only with Queen Ahmes could this general produce children with a link to the kings who began the Eighteenth Dynasty. The dynastic succession had been broken on the male side, but an appropriate royal woman could create some kind of continuation. Their children, at least, would have the royal blood that Thutmose I did not have.

23.
There has been the suggestion that royal women “gave up” their titles of King’s Daughter or King’s Sister to marry outside the royal family, thus providing an explanation for why we never see these women anywhere but married to the king at Hatshepsut’s time. However, there is little, if any, evidence for this happening during the Eighteenth Dynasty. See Roth, “Models of Authority,” 11.

24.
Bryan, “Eighteenth Dynasty Before the Amarna Period,” 227–28.

25.
I have to be clear that there is no explicit evidence that marrying the king was a formal “rule” for royal women, only that there is no evidence of royal sisters or daughters marrying anyone but the king in the early Eighteenth Dynasty. Such strict control over royal women was not characteristic of all time periods. Back in the Old Kingdom and later in the Third Intermediate Period, royal daughters regularly married outside the royal family. Although some historians argue that there are simply not enough definite sister-wives during the New Kingdom to be able to infer this kind of endogamous “rule” (see Dodson and Hilton,
Complete Royal Families of Ancient Egypt
, 122–41), I conclude that King’s Daughters and King’s Sisters were expected to marry the current or next king, at least during the early Eighteenth Dynasty, and that there were important political and economic benefits for this practice.

26.
For more about marriage in ancient Egypt, see Robins,
Women in Ancient Egypt
, and J. Toivari-Viitala,
Women at Deir el-Medina: A Study of the Status and Roles of the Female Inhabitants in the Workmen’s Community During the Ramesside Period
(Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 2001).

27.
Some Egyptologists see no reason to date the marriage of Thutmose and Mutnofret to his accession as king, leaving room for an earlier date. Aidan Dodson, for instance, believes that Mutnofret could have been Thutmose I’s wife for many years before he became king and that their relationship would provide an excellent
argument against a ban on royal women “marrying out” (Dodson, personal communication, 2013; also see Peter Dorman, “Early Reign of Thutmose III” in Cline and O’Connor,
Thutmose III: A New Biography
, 59n7). However, because the only evidence for their marriage comes from after his accession and because there is no other evidence of royal daughters marrying nonroyal men, I prefer the hypothesis that Mutnofret married Thutmose I after his ascension.

28.
Thutmose I reigned for thirteen or fourteen years. See Hornung, Krauss, and Warburton,
Ancient Egyptian Chronology
, 199–200; Dorman, “Early Reign of Thutmose III,” 39; and Bryan, “Eighteenth Dynasty Before the Amarna Period,” 230–35.

For related discussions of Hatshepsut’s age at queenship, regency, and kingship, see F. Maruéjol,
Thoutmosis III et la corégence avec Hatchepsout
(Paris: Pygmalion, 2008), 22–25, and David A. Warburton,
Architecture, Power, and Religion: Hatshepsut, Amun & Karnak in Context
, Beiträge zur Archäologie 7 (Zurich: LIT Verlag, 2012), 239–40.

29.
For details on childbirth and childhood in ancient Egypt, see J. J. Janssen and Rosalind Janssen,
Growing Up in Ancient Egypt
(London: Rubicon Press, 1990); Robins,
Women in Ancient Egypt
; and Toivari-Viitala,
Women at Deir el-Medina
.

30.
For proof that hunter-gatherers understand the link between breast-feeding and conception, see M. Konner and C. Worthman, “Nursing Frequency, Gonadal Function, and Birth Spacing Among !Kung Hunter-Gatherers,”
Science
207 (1980). For evidence of knowledge of this link in the ancient world, see V. Flides,
Breasts, Bottle and Babies: A History of Infant Feeding
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1986). Egyptians must have known about breast-feeding and its immunity and contraception benefits. See Erika Feucht, “Women,” in
The Egyptians
, ed. Sergio Donadoni (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 315–46.

31.
There is little research on wet-nursing in ancient Egypt, but see Keith R. Bradley, “Wet-Nursing at Rome: A Study in Social Relations,” in
The Family in Ancient Rome
, ed. Beryl Rawson (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 201–29.

32.
A poorly preserved sandstone statue of a small adult King Hatshepsut sitting on the lap of her wet nurse, Satre, also known as Inet, was placed in her funerary temple at Deir el-Bahri after Satre’s death. The statue is currently in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum (JdÉ 56264) and was found by Winlock during excavations at Deir el-Bahri. See Herbert E. Winlock, “The Museum’s Excavation at Thebes,”
Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin
27, no. 3 (1932). Amazingly, the inscription on an ostracon in the Ambras Collection in Vienna matches the broken text on the statue, allowing a better understanding of the piece. Winlock translated it as follows: “May the king Maatkare [Hatshepsut] and Osiris, first of the Westerners, [the great god] Lord of Abydos, be gracious and give a mortuary offering [of cakes and beer, beef and fowl, and everything] good and pure, and the sweet breath of
the north wind to the spirit of the chief nurse who suckled the Mistress of the Two Lands, Sit-Re, called Yen [Inet], justified.”